Notes on software development.
Mostly .NET, C# and game development using XNA.

May 10, 2013

OUYA IS F-F-Fun(dead)?

OUYA project raised some $15M from their new investors. They are excited of course. This is probably good for a company financial success. However is it good for a mission that OUYA originally started? I don't know, but I surely know that original founders are now not own 100% of the share. They could probably own 90%, or maybe 50% depending on how much company price was estimated at the moment of the deal. And that new shareholders can, in some future, have some other vision about what OUYA console should be. That's the facts part.

The ethics part is probably even more interesting. See, backers are, naturally, the real shareholders of the company. They have taken the real risk of funding the project on early stages. Yet thay will have just a console box as a revard for that. Now some big guys, which brobably wasn't happy to fund project at early stages, come in and skim the cream. I know, backers take what they have been told, but still they funded OUYA and their founders, not OUYA and NVIDIA et al.

I actually think that can be called some sort of abuse of crowd funding idea. The crowd takes highest risk at the start of the project and takes some product for that, then real investors are safe to take share of the company. That's really nice trick. Nobody probably like to fund a project that will use that to find some more funding.. or I'm wrong?